


Be Mine

by DesdemonaKaylose



Series: Strange Days at Black Hole High [2]
Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Kink Meme, M/M, Romantic Comedy, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-28 11:31:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13903122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: Jimmy has friends now? Maybe? He should get on this valentines thing.





	Be Mine

**Author's Note:**

> this also came off the kink meme last month, I just want to get it over here with my other high school au stuff.
> 
> A fill for [ this one](https://jthm-kinkmeme.tumblr.com/post/170722807048/valentines-yes-highschool-au-one-of-these-card)! You give me a blueprint and I will construct you a _beautiful_ shack.
> 
> * * *

Because it’s spanish class and no one has ever given a fuck about high school spanish, especially the fourth of the school who deliberately avoided learning it just to piss off their abuelas, Mr. Cox is playing a foreign movie with english subtitles. Mr. Cox is not even close to as much fun as his name makes him sound.

Jimmy sits in the back of the class with his feet up on his desk, which is tricky in these baby chairs that he’s almost certain the schoolboard lifted from the old elementary school, but he does it anyhow. Because he’s incredibly talented. And also because he’s had a lot of time to practice while Mr. Cox is playing movies. **  
**

That girl Tess is sitting in front of him, getting an earful from Gwish about some girly thing or another. Jimmy’s half tuned in, because this movie is shit and no one has even died yet, but he doesn’t really start paying attention until he hears Johnny’s name.

“–since he electrocuted your boyfriend,” Gwish says, leaning in close, stupidly long nails pressed into her lip. “So I guess you haven’t got anyone to give you a valentine, huh?”

Tess just blew air over her teeth, chin propped up in her hand like she could barely spare the effort to keep herself upright. “Okay, one thing, Dillon isn’t dead, he’s just in the hospital. Another thing, I broke up with _him_ , so a valentine from him is the last fucking thing I want.”

Oh, Jimmy knows this story. Sometime a couple months back, when things were really bad, Tess's boyfriend grabbed Johnny's Walkman and dangled it over a drainage ditch. Nobody knows whether the leaf blower was already in the water or not when Dillon fell in, but Jimmy's got his own convictions about it. Dillon sure ain't gonna testify. Word on the street is Dillon doesn't remember a whole lot of  _anything_ these days.

Gwish just clicks her tongue like the most mascara-smeared kindergarten teacher to ever be fired for hanging up a cross upside down. “I just feel bad for you,” she says, not sounding like she feels particularly bad. “I know I’ll be getting cards from at least four boys, one of whom is in a death ska band by the way, and I would just hate to be the one girl in our class who didn’t get anything.”

“Death ska isn’t a thing,” Tess says.

“Of course it is,” Gwish says. “You know, if you don’t want to be a _complete_ loser, there’s still time.”

“There’s one day,” Tess says. “I’m not going to throw myself on the mercy of the bottom feeders in this school just to get a lollipop delivered in fourth period. Right Jimmy?”

Jimmy startles in his seat, catching himself on the edge of his desk as he clunks forward. “Uh,” he says, “I wasn’t listening.”

“Sure you fucking weren’t,” Tess says. She turns back to Gwish, and she says, “even Jimmy knows this whole holiday is bullshit. I bet he’s not gonna give even one girl a valentine, no matter how desperate he is.”

Gwish twirls a strand of hair around her finger. “He doesn’t even like girls,” she says. “He’s, like, terminally queer. I bet you anything he’s giving some boy his grimy crayon love note tomorrow.”

“I’m literally right here,” Jimmy says.

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m insulting you.” Gwish doesn’t even look at him. “Not even Jimmy’s so pathetic that he doesn’t like _somebody_.”

From the front of the classroom, Cox yells: “Can you gremlins stop talking for five minutes? I’m trying to grade your quizzes!”

Tess and Gwish slink away from each other, and Jimmy slumps back into his seat, rocking faintly through the whole sequence as Juan begs Carmelita to run away with him to France in the fuzzy twinkly lights of a Spanish street. He didn’t know guys could give other guys valentines cards. Fuck, maybe he should?

Juan slowly morphs in the screen of his mind, eyes disappearing behind glasses, winning magazine-cover smile becoming the enigmatic upward twist of an expression that conveys some emotion Jimmy can only guess at. He likes the idea of making someone his valentine. That means they’re his, right? He guesses it only lasts a year, otherwise they wouldn’t do the holiday every February, but still. A whole year of someone being his. Maybe a specific someone. Maybe a specific someone who lays out all his pencils across the top of his desk at the beginning of every class according to size order.

How much competition could there be? Jimmy chews on his pen, ignoring the slightly numb flavor of the ink leaking through. 

Edgar’s one half of the coolest duo in the school, obviously, but Edgar’s the silent partner in it–even if other people gave Johnny and his friend the recognition they so rightfully deserved, as artists of the chaotic, he doubts anyone else would jump to Edgar as a place to lay their affections. Even Jimmy’s a little stumped by his interest.

Still. He likes the idea. He spends the rest of the movie fantasizing about how overcome Edgar will be with his romantic gesture, plotting and replotting the exact choreography of Edgar swooning into his arms as a heavy metal band jams on This Magic Moment somewhere behind them.

He floats out of that class, barely noticing the way he’s ping-ponging off people’s shoulders in the hallway - normally he ducks through the gamut in a seething hunch, kicking freshmen out of his way - until he has to do a double-take, rewinding his steps backwards. Edgar is standing at his locker, exchanging a math book for an english book, bathed in the fuzzy yellow spotlight of Romance and also the western facing hall window.

“Edgar!” Jimmy says, ducking under the arm of a varsity footballer who might have been reaching for his girlfriend, skidding over the tile. “You don’t usually come out here between classes! Except for when you have homework due, but you don’t have english homework due on Mondays.”

Edgar just keeps feeding books into his bag, switching out pencils that have gone dull for sharper ones. “That’s a very comprehensive understanding of my schedule,” he says.

“Yeah?” Jimmy says, pleased. “Well I follow you sometimes so, I’ve got it pretty mapped out by now.”

Edgar pauses at that, but then he goes back to sorting without commentary. “What can I help you with?” he asks.

Jimmy wraps his hand around his own elbow, rocking back on his heels as he realizes that, for all his meticulous choreography, he did not actually get this far into the mental script. Fuck, was there a specific way you were supposed to do this? Were you supposed to warn them before you did it?

“So um,” he says, “Valentines, right?”

“Ah,” Edgar says. Edgar gives him a wry little look over his shoulder. “So you’re thinking about it as well.”

Jimmy brightens. “Yeah! Have you ever heard of, like, guys getting valentines? From other guys? You can do that, right?”

“Oh, sure,” Edgar says, “it’s the twenty-first century. Not that some people seem to be aware…”

Jimmy has that feeling he frequently has when Edgar talks to him, which is the feeling that there are several layers of things he is not hearing underneath the thing he is hearing. He hopes Edgar isn’t talking about him. “N-no?” he says.

“I suppose it would be too much to ask,” Edgar says, closing his locker door a little harder than necessary, “for a little appreciation–a little recognition, maybe, just once even. You know I don’t ask for much. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Jimmy hazards.

Edgar nods. “Thank you,” he says. He pulls his backpack on and turns to Jimmy for the first time, expression attractively serious and completely fucking inscrutable.  “I don’t suppose Johnny ever thinks about the importance of the gesture, does he, except when it concerns literally any other person. You know last year he got a frog heart out of the dissection lab for Devi? When there are plenty of other people in his immediate vicinity who would be satisfied with just getting a card, out of the corner store.”

Jimmy looks nervously down the hall. He has no idea what Edgar is talking about. Except maybe that Johnny is better at doing cool valentines gifts than he is. Damn, he should have known Johnny would be good at this. Johnny was good at everything. He’s going to look like an amatuer next to that.

“Where… is Nny, by the way?” Jimmy says, backing slowly away.

Edgar rolls his eyes. “Behind the art building, I’m sure. Devi has art this period.”

“Okay… cool…” Jimmy says. He takes another couple steps back into the thinning crowd. “I’m just gonna… see you tomorrow…”

Jimmy pays zero attention to the bell as it rings, busy as he is with scaling the bus ramp back to the bottom of the art building. One thing Jimmy prides himself in is always knowing the backroute to get anywhere. Comes in handy when you’re following someone and you don’t want them to know it just yet.

He finds Johnny perched on the top of a dumpster, watching a classroom through the window across the alley. It’s Extremely Cool. Jimmy stops just underneath his gently swaying boot and waits to be noticed. It takes a hot second.

You don’t notice how much little movement there is in someone until all of it stops at once. Johnny looks down at him, eyes narrow.

“You,” he says.

“Me!” Jimmy agrees. “You mind if I come up?”

“I mind very much.”

“Tight,” Jimmy says, and pulls himself up. The metal lid clangs under him as he settles in. “So I hear you’re a romantic boss when it comes to big gestures of suave seduction.”

Johnny gives him a complicated look that involves a lot of facial muscles and nose wrinkling.

“You know,” Jimmy clarifies, “Valentines Day?”

“Ah, yes.” Johnny goes back to looking through the window. “The cursed day.”

“Cursed?” Jimmy says.

Johnny hunches forward into himself. “Sometime around the end of middle school, it turns into a complete swamp-pit of jealousy, hurt feelings, and diabetic episodes. Screaming and crying, the wailing and gnashing of teeth - hallmark cards, insincere platitudes, sitcom tropes. If there was ever purity in this pathetic carnival, it died with Saint Valentine.”

Jimmy nods, slowly. “Yeahhhh,” he says, “I feel you. Corporate hypnotism, international conspiracy, I’m hip. But um. Maybe one time you wanna do something anyway? Something–” Jimmy pauses, carefully working through his Nny-to-English dictionary for the correct word, “–something pure?”

Johnny softens. He folds his hands in his lap, looking through this moment and into something else. “You can try,” he says. “If you like having your heart grilled on the open coal fire of failure.”

“I was thinking balloons,” Jimmy says, swinging his feet. “Like, big ones.”

“No amount of balloons can undo what’s been done, unfortunately,” Johnny says. “All you can do is embrace your sadness, knowing that it validates the joy you once felt, an inverse proof of meaning in an indifferent, cold world.”

“Yeah I guess balloons are kind of junior high,” Jimmy says.

Johnny sits back on his hands, rolling his neck so that he’s looking at Jimmy for the first time. “Even you, sad fuck that you are, deserve to have your devotion received in the spirit which it is given. If your heart is crushed under an uncaring heel, at least let it be the heel for which you hold affection. Buy them gummy worms. Everyone likes gummy worms.”

The two of them sit there for a moment, contemplating their own world-weariness, until inside the art room Devi spots them lurking and flips them the bird, before pulling the shades closed.

Johnny seems like he’s got a lot on his mind, so Jimmy quietly slides off the top of the dumpster and lets him have some space. Man. Nobody does tragic introspection like Nny.

With everybody in class, the campus is pretty quiet. There’s some stoners hanging out around, but mostly they use the same alley Johnny’s currently in and lately they won’t go anywhere Johnny already is after previous Incidents proved that Johnny and smoke of any kind are a very dangerous combination. Jimmy doesn’t feel like going through the whole process of showing up to class tardy with so much on his mind, so he ends up just wandering around where the hall monitor won’t notice him. He winds up passing by the band room, eventually, where someone has erected a kind of rudimentary fort out of tuba cases. It’s pretty impressive.

As he leans over the edge to get a better look, Tenna pops up about an inch from his nose.

“Whacha lookin at?” she says, just about giving him a coronary.

Jimmy tries to look cool and unaffected from where he’s collapsed back on the floor clutching his heart. “Noth… thing…” he says.

Tenna leans over the edge of the fort, one of those squeezable chew toys dangling from her hand. It looks like a little skeleton. It’s cute as fuck.

“Cutting class again?” she says.

Jimmy brushes himself off, aiming for a little more dignity. “Like you’re not?”

The toy gives a little squeak. “Actually I got kicked out of class for being a nuisance. Apparently making a funny noise every time the band director opens his mouth is ‘inappropriate’ and ‘immature’. Mr. Williams doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.”

“What a bastard.”

“Also he keeps calling me by the wrong name.”

Jimmy, who will answer to anything if it’s said in the usual combination of revulsion and annoyance, makes what he hopes is an appropriately sympathetic noise. Inside the band room, a tuba backfires.

“So what’s got you all moony and contemplative?” Tenna says.

Jimmy, always more than happy to talk at length about his many many issues, sighs and falls onto his back dramatically. The tile hurts his head, but it’s worth it for the drama.

“Tenna,” he says, “do you have a valentine yet?”

“Sure,” she says. He looks up. The toy gives another little squeak. “Spooky’s my bae for the day.”

Jimmy flops his head back against the ground, which hurts just as much the second time.

“That doesn’t count,” he says, “your toy can’t be your valentine.”

“Name one reason.”

Jimmy fold his hands on his stomach. Huh.

“I wanna ask Edgar,” he says, “but he’s got like, standards and stuff. He’s got class. Nny said I should buy him gummy worms, but I also don’t think he was actually talking about Edgar… What do you think?”

Tenna makes a thoughtful noise. “I think Edgar doesn’t actually eat candy.”

Jimmy slaps a palm against his forehead. “Fucking of course,” he says, “shit, I forgot. What the hell am I gonna do?”

“Have you considered balloons.”

“Yes,” Jimmy says, miserably.

“Anyway,” Tenna says, “Edgar wants Johnny to ask him. He’s been passive-aggressively dropping hints for a week now.”

Jimmy chews his lip. Johnny and Edgar are the death metal power couple of the century, he can see how that makes sense. It would be really hot if they’d kiss, he decides. Somewhere with a good view, preferably. But that doesn’t solve the problem of what _Jimmy_ wants, which is something to do with Spanish streets and cherubs and twinkly lights.

“I guess I’m just fucked,” Jimmy says, at last, puffing out an irritated breath. “Gwish was right, I’m pathetic.”

“Aww,” Tenna says. But she doesn’t actually argue with him. Jimmy sniffles in a manly sort of way.

He just… got really excited about the idea of doing something right for once. He wants Edgar to look at him the way that Carmelita looks at Juan, when he holds the rose out to her on the dance floor under the eiffel tower with the band playing and the stars all big and bright…

He sits up. “Oh,” he says. “I’m a genius.”

Tenna lifts an eyebrow. “That was a fast turnaround,” she says.

Jimmy opens and closes his hand in front of him, imagining a new moment, a new ending. Yes! He’s going to slay the fuck out of this holiday, and Edgar is going to swoon right into his arms and say something smart like, “Ravish me you darling epitome of masculine charisma,” and then maybe Johnny will be there and they can all… smooch…

Jimmy turns to Tenna. “Where,” he says, “do you think I could buy a rose with about sixty seven cents and a pocket full of bus tokens?”

 


End file.
